"A Committee of Correspondence"

14 October 2019

Open Thread - TTG

We’re not lacking for news, but I figured an open thread would provide a good respite while El Jefe mends. My younger son is an unbelievable coder. He’s also a metal head who often plays poker with a Richmond-based metal band. Sunday, he introduced me to a metal band that truly moved me.The Hu is a Mongolian heavy metal band using traditional Mongolian musical instruments and throat singing in their art. Enjoy.

Several months ago, in a comment to one of Babelfish's posts on aerospace,
I expressed concern over the problems DOD and its contractors are having in building systems that work.
Well, a recent Forbes article seems to exemplify these concerns:"The Most Expensive Ship In The World [the Ford, CVN-78] Is Broken."
Is the problem with DOD? Or its contractors? Or does it represent a broader failure in America? Or is it just the expected problems our systems have always had?
Wiser people than I may know the answer to that.

Putting an experiemental launch system on a fleet carrier in the hopes it will work is just assinine. But it will make lots of money for the shipyard, designers and others associated with the program. A few flag officers should be forced into retirement and a few more tried for malfeasance. That might have some effect. But at least all the alphabet soup of diversity initiatives are being met.

There is a fascinating article in Wired that is from the book
SANDWORM, by Andy Greenberg, to be published on November 5, 2019, by Doubleday
It claims it was Russia that hacked the Korean Olympics, USA elections, and the Hillary emails. There is no mention of Postol or other analysts that have been discussed on this site.
Here are a few quotes:
When state-sponsored Russian hackers stole and leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016, we now know that the Kremlin likewise created diversions and cover stories. It invented a lone Romanian hacker named Guccifer 2.0 to take credit for the hacks; it also spread the rumors that a murdered DNC staffer named Seth Rich had leaked the emails from inside the organization—and it distributed many of the stolen documents through a fake whistle-blowing site called DCLeaks. Those deceptions became conspiracy theories, fanned by right-wing commentators and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Analysts at the security firm CrowdStrike would find other apparent Russian calling cards, elements that resembled a piece of Russian ransomware known as XData.
two unnamed intelligence officials told The Washington Post that the Olympics cyberattack had been carried out by Russia and that it had sought to frame North Korea. The anonymous officials went further, blaming the attack specifically on Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU—the same agency that had masterminded the interference in the 2016 US election and the blackout attacks in Ukraine, and had unleashed NotPetya's devastation.
On July 13, 2018, special counsel Robert Mueller unsealed an indictment against 12 GRU hackers for engaging in election interference, laying out the evidence that they'd hacked the DNC and the Clinton campaign; the indictment even included details like the servers they'd used and the terms they'd typed into a search engine.
Deep in the 29-page indictment, Matonis read a description of the alleged activities of one GRU hacker named Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev. Along with two other agents, Kovalev was named as a member of GRU Unit 74455, based in the northern Moscow suburb of Khimki in a 20-story building known as “the Tower.”

The indictment stated that Unit 74455 had provided backend servers for the GRU's intrusions into the DNC and the Clinton campaign. But more surprisingly, the indictment added that the group had “assisted in” the operation to leak the emails stolen in those operations. Unit 74455, the charges stated, had helped to set up DCLeaks.com and even Guccifer 2.0, the fake Romanian hacker persona that had claimed credit for the intrusions and given the Democrats' stolen emails to WikiLeaks.

The history of German settlements in Russia goes back to their settlements in the marshes of Lower Saxony, later in the marshes of northern Poland around Danzig. Nice detailed story is in the book by Reuben Epp, "The Story of Low German and Plautdietsch" - Readers Press, 1993. Well written.